Heartland

Pista wrote: ↑20 Oct 2022, 07:14 Ghosts, gods and the Sisters of Mercy: Guitarist Ben Christo talks before their NZ shows.

With helpful photo of what Ben might look like

Ben Christo is in mid-flow, eloquently pontificating on religion and the supernatural and people's need to believe in something when suddenly the Zoom screen goes completely black.

There is no frozen screen or stuck picture. For all intents and purposes, he has disappeared into the void. As time ticks by I think that's it for the interview when, just as unexpectedly, he reappears.

"I think what happened was there was some kind of divine intervention from a higher power because I was blaspheming against the gods," he laughs. "They don't like me questioning."

I hadn't intended to get into matters of the spiritual or paranormal but perhaps it was unavoidable. Christo is the guitarist for the pioneering and influential goth-rock band Sisters of Mercy. The band's moody, smoke-black songs and vivid lyrical imagery are filled with religious iconography and literature references that create a graveyard atmosphere and have provided the template for countless bands to follow since the early 1980s - although Christo wouldn't join until 2006.
"Over the years I've reached the conclusion that I don't disbelieve in anything," he continues, now that the gods appear to have forgiven him and our Zoom call is up and working again. "Historically there are so many things now that were once considered to be witchcraft or sorcery or the interventions of the gods and now are accepted as nature or technology. Things that were written off 100 years ago, 50 years ago, are now accepted as fact. My thought about supernatural activity is not necessarily that it's a sentient presence that knows what it's doing, it's more like a trapped energy. The same as how you can enter a room and feel that it's uncomfortable although nothing tangibly makes it so. My ethos when it comes to any of these things, supernatural or extraterrestrial, is to not disbelieve anything. To stay open-minded."

He says the same is true of the band as a whole.

"The Sisters have been very strident in that sense of accepting everybody, regardless of ethnic background, belief systems, race, creed, sexuality, gender. We've always been a very accepting band. That's why you have such a brilliant cross-section of people at our shows. It's really very varied. Possibly much more so than many other rock bands would experience."